Preparations for cyber warfare are in full swing everywhere around the world. Photo / Thinkstock
Preparations for cyber warfare are in full swing everywhere around the world. Photo / Thinkstock
Friday, and I'm minded to follow up on some earlier columns, starting with this one from February about anti-virus veteran Mikko Hyppönen who said the internet is a huge social experiment on privacy, and nobody knows where it's going.
There's more the internet social experiment though, namely cyberwarfare. "Cyber" is a silly word but the concept of keyboard warriors duking it out with each other over networks and by using malware is outlandish enough to fit the term.
The big nations of the world are serious about cyber warfare too. For instance, Pentagon released its second cyber security strategy for the United States armed forces this week and it advocates "offensive options" to complement defences.
Said offensive options would be used to disrupt enemies' networks and military infrastructure and weapons capabilities - which makes sense in the context of total war, but who'd have thought that that would happen when the internet was born?
The thought of internet-borne military action is really rather bizarre. Virtual skirmishes are done by abusing the internet's good-will and trust principles.
That includes traffic flooding and redirection, poking holes in device and software security, surveillance and spreading malware.
It does seem inevitable though, and cyber hostilities have been taking place for a while.
Earlier this year, China was found to have used its Great Firewall to manipulate traffic to create a giant denial of service attack on open source code repository Github. This was apparently done to silence Greatfire, a site dedicated to online monitoring of censorship in China.
Preparations for cyber warfare are in full swing everywhere around the world, with the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation - NATO - conducting cyber maneouvres.
For the past three years, NATO has held an annual exercise, Locked Shields, in Tallinn, Estonia. This year, sixteen countries took part and the NATO home team won.
Locked Shields. Photo / NATO
The NATO cyber warriors attacked and defended industrial control and data acquisition systems, and tried to break the security of Windows 8 and 10.
Perhaps it's a good thing to test digital infrastructure to find weaknesses before adversaries do, but it'll be difficult for the military geeks to marry being a poacher and gamekeeper at the same time.
Apropos the upcoming Rural Broadband Initiative Extension or RBI2 funding and the additional money being made available for the Ultrafast Broadband - UFB - project: Auckland Council is soliciting input from Franklin, Great Barrier, Rodney, Waiheke and Waitakere on their connectivity issues.
The form is here and the responses will be used as part of Auckland Council's submission for a Registration of Interest for part of the $210 million of UFB money to extend broadband coverage.
Fill it in if you live outside the city and want to continue doing so yet have good internet access. Well, that's the theory at least.
Sure, they're US$6,200 each but they're signed and I totally buy into Crowe and Snee's notion that it's useful for the "constant, gnawing need for narcissistic internet validation."
Photo / Justin Crowe/Aric Snee
I was thinking aloud on Twitter that a selfie leg might be err, not handy but nice to have to go with the arm.
